No More Vietnams (16 page)

We also decided to keep the bombing secret. We did this for two reasons: We wanted to avoid the domestic uproar that might result from a publicized air strike, and we wanted to avoid putting Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's head of state, in a perilous political position.

I had first met Sihanouk sixteen years before. From the long talks I had with him when I visited Phnom Penh in 1953, I knew he was a clever, opportunistic survivor. His actions did not govern events; events governed his actions. What he did or could do depended largely on what happened in Vietnam. For years he had maneuvered to appease the North Vietnamese because he believed that they represented the side with the best chance of winning. In 1965, when South Vietnam was tottering on the brink of collapse, he severed diplomatic relations with Washington and acquiesced in the establishment of Communist sanctuaries and supply lines in Cambodia.

By the late 1960s, when the tide of the war had turned, Sihanouk began to grow deeply concerned about the Communist military presence in his country. He looked to the United States for help. “We don't want any Vietnamese in Cambodia,” he told an emissary from President Johnson in January 1968. “We will be very glad if you solve our problem. We are not opposed to hot pursuit in uninhabited areas. You will liberate us from the Viet Cong. For me only Cambodia counts. I want you to force the Viet Cong to leave Cambodia.” Also, in a press interview in December 1967, Sihanouk said that he would grant American and South Vietnamese forces the right to go into his country in “hot pursuit” of North Vietnamese
and National Liberation Front troops, as long as no Cambodians were harmed.

As we considered the bombing of the sanctuaries in March 1969, we made these calculations. We knew Sihanouk would approve of the air strikes. But we also knew that he could not afford to endorse our bombing publicly, both because it would violate his formal neutrality and because it would risk provoking a North Vietnamese reprisal. If we bombed the sanctuaries secretly, we believed Sihanouk would probably remain silent. If we announced our bombing publicly, we believed he probably would feel compelled to protest our actions. Cambodian protests, in turn, would create pressure on us to stop the bombing. We therefore proceeded in secrecy.

On March 18, our first bombing run in Cambodia took place. It was a great success. We received reports that our bombs touched off multiple secondary explosions, which meant that they had hit ammunition dumps or fuel depots. Crew members observed a total of seventy-three such explosions in the target area, ranging up to five times the normal intensity of a typical secondary explosion. Politically, Hanoi's diplomatic foot-dragging ended as its delegate in Paris quickly took up our proposal to convene a session of private talks.

Originally we had contemplated only this one attack. We were prepared to defend our action publicly if we received a formal protest. But none was made. Hanoi's leaders had no grounds for complaint, because they had for years denied that they had any troops in Cambodia. And Sihanouk, as we expected, assented to our bombing through his silence.

In April and May, I ordered air strikes against a string of enemy-occupied areas within five miles of the border. White House approval was required for each attack through August 1969; thereafter, I turned over general authority to conduct the bombing campaign to our commanders in the field. Our sorties, now conducted regularly against the sanctuaries, wreaked havoc with the enemy's logistics and forced the Communists to abort planned offensives. By curtailing the enemy's ability
to attack within South Vietnam, the secret bombing saved the lives of many of our fighting men and bought us valuable time to press forward with Vietnamization.

In May 1969, leaks to the news media revealed our operations. Sihanouk's response to the stories showed that he was in favor of what we were doing. “Here it is,” he said at a press conference, “the first report about several B-52 bombings. Yet I have not been informed about that at all, because I have not lost any houses, any countrymen, nothing, nothing. Nobody was caught in those barrages—nobody, no Cambodians.” He added, “If there is a buffalo or any Cambodian killed, I will be informed immediately. But this is an affair between the Americans and the Viet Cong—Viet Minh without any Khmer witnesses. There have been no Khmer witnesses, so how can I protest?”

Some critics later contended that the secret bombing was an illegal abuse of presidential power. There was no substance to this charge. No reasonable interpretation of the Constitution could conclude that the President, as commander in chief, was forbidden from attacking areas occupied by enemy forces and used by them as bases from which to strike at American and allied troops. Congress was consulted within the limits imposed by the necessary secrecy of the operation. Richard Russell and John Stennis, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, were informed and approved of our plans.

Former President Eisenhower was the only one outside of government that I informed about the bombing. When I briefed him on the operation at Walter Reed Hospital, he strongly endorsed the decision.

The charge that our bombing was illegal under the standards of international law also was without foundation. It is illegal to bomb a neutral country. But neutrality is more than pacifism. As the Hague Convention of 1907 stated, “A neutral country has the obligation not to allow its territory to be used by a belligerent. If the neutral country is unwilling or unable to prevent this, the other belligerent has the right to take appropriate
counteraction.” North Vietnam was using Cambodian territory as a staging bound for its aggression. South Vietnam and the United States therefore had the right to strike back at the North Vietnamese forces inside Cambodia.

By mid-1969, Sihanouk made it plain that he understood it was North Vietnam's actions, not those of the United States, that were endangering his people and threatening to pull his country into the war. In June he complained at a press conference that Hanoi had crowded so many Communist troops into one of Cambodia's northeast provinces that it was “practically North Vietnamese territory.” A month later he invited me to visit Cambodia to mark the improving relations between our two countries.

• • •

While we applied pressure on the military front, we continued to push forward on the diplomatic front. On December 20,1968, I had sent a message to Hanoi indicating our interest in a fair negotiated settlement. The message was sent through Jean Sainteny, a personal friend whom I had met at the home of Paul Louis Weiller in the south of France in 1965 and who had good relations with the North Vietnamese leaders. On February 1, 1969, in one of my first directives to the National Security Council staff, I had ordered a preliminary exploration of the possibility of a rapprochement with Communist China. We had also taken the first steps toward a detente with the Soviet Union. On April 14, Kissinger met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and presented a proposal for setting up a private negotiating channel with North Vietnam.

On May 14, in a nationally televised address, I put forward a new peace proposal. Its terms went beyond any proposal made by Johnson. I proposed that we arrange for a mutual withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese forces and for internationally supervised, free elections to decide the future of South Vietnam. I instructed our delegate to the peace talks, Henry Cabot Lodge, to be as forthcoming as possible to North Vietnamese counterproposals. On June 8, I met with President Thieu on Midway Island. He expressed his support for our
peace proposal. We also announced that the United States was withdrawing 25,000 military personnel from Vietnam—the first reduction since combat forces arrived in 1961. On July 16, I sent another appeal for peace to Ho Chi Minh in a letter delivered through Jean Sainteny. On August 2, I met with Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, and he agreed to use his influence with the North Vietnamese to get the peace talks off dead center.

All our conciliatory moves proved useless. On August 25, Ho Chi Minh's reply to my personal letter arrived. He coldly rebuffed our peace proposals and insisted that we withdraw unilaterally from Vietnam and overthrow President Thieu's government as we left.

On September 3, Ho Chi Minh died. Some observers speculated that his successors might be more amenable to ending the war through negotiations. They proved to be wrong. North Vietnam's leader had changed, but its policies remained the same.

Meanwhile, public support for our war effort was eroding. Our peace initiatives, the start of our withdrawal program, and our conciliatory speeches slowed the erosion, but they also whetted the appetites of the antiwar activists. As we approached the first anniversary of the bombing halt on November 1, 1969, I knew the time had come for a bold move to mobilize American support for our military efforts so that we could secure a diplomatic settlement that would achieve the goal for which American soldiers had fought and died for over five years: a South Vietnam free from Communist domination and capable of defending itself against both its internal and external enemies.

What we needed most was time. No President has a limitless amount of time to invest in any policy. Because my predecessors had exhausted the patience of the American people with the Vietnam War, I was acutely aware that I was living on borrowed time. If I was to have enough time for my policies to succeed, my first priority had to be to gather as much
political support as possible for the war from the American people.

In late October 1969, I began preparing a national address on the war in Vietnam to be delivered on November 3, 1969. When I went to Camp David to make a final review of the speech, I took with me a memorandum from Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who had been a personal friend for over twenty years and whose views on foreign policy I greatly respected.

He opened by stating, “The continuance of the war in Vietnam, in my judgment, endangers the future of this nation.” He said that his concern went beyond the loss of lives or the waste of money and resources. “Most serious,” he wrote, “are the deep divisions within our society to which this conflict of dubious origin and purpose is contributing.” He said that he would give articulate support to “any or all of the following decisions” if I found them necessary to end the war rapidly. He then listed actions that amounted to a unilateral cease-fire and withdrawal. “I know that a settlement arrived at in this fashion is not pleasant to contemplate,” he concluded, “especially in view of the dug-in diplomatic and military positions which, unfortunately, were assumed over the past few years.”

I realized that with this memorandum Mansfield was offering what would be the last chance for me to end the war I had inherited. I interpreted his references to it as a “conflict of dubious origin” and to the positions “unfortunately” assumed over the years as signals that he would even allow me to claim that I was making the best possible end of a bad war my Democratic predecessors had begun. When I decided not to take up Mansfield's offer, I knew that from a political standpoint what had been Kennedy's and Johnson's war would become Nixon's war. But as President I believed that I had no choice but to end the war on terms consistent with our national honor. My task then became to persuade the American people to commit themselves to this goal as well.

My speech on November 3 addressed the questions of what a defeat in Vietnam would mean for South Vietnam, the world as a whole, and the United States. It summarized the reasons why we were in Vietnam.

I began by making the moral case for our intervention. Our original decision to intervene was justified because we were trying to stop foreign aggression: “Fifteen years ago North Vietnam, with the logistic support of Communist China and the Soviet Union, launched a campaign to impose a Communist government on South Vietnam by instigating and supporting a revolution.” Our continued involvement was just because it prevented massive human suffering: A precipitate withdrawal of American forces would “inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North.”

I then explained that a unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam would be a disaster for the cause of peace in the world. Our acquiescence in aggression would encourage further aggression: “Our defeat and humiliation in South Vietnam without question would promote recklessness in the councils of those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest. This would spark violence wherever our commitments help maintain the peace—in the Middle East, in Berlin, eventually even in the Western Hemisphere.” Peace could not be won through a withdrawal bordering on surrender. “It would not bring peace,” I said. “It would bring more war.”

After outlining my plan to end the war and the steps I had already taken to do so, I concluded by speaking about the consequences of a precipitate withdrawal for the United States. “The immediate reaction would be a sense of relief that our men were coming home,” I said. “But as we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit as a people.” I observed that while it was not fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny in these troubled times, it was clear that “any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral
stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership.”

I had spent hours writing the conclusion, in which I sought to go over the heads of the antiwar opinion makers in the media and to appeal directly to the American people for unity: “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.” I said that I had initiated policies that would enable me to keep my campaign pledge to end the war. “The more support I can have from the American people,” I stated, “the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate in Paris. Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”